Johnson v. United States

Petitioner was convicted of wilfully attempting to defeat and evade his federal income taxes for the years 1936 and 1937. He was acquitted for 1935. Petitioner was a political leader in Atlantic City and Atlantic County, New Jersey. The prosecution’s theory was that he had received large sums of money from those conducting the numbers game for protection against police interference and had not reported those sums in his income tax returns for 1935, 1936, and 1937. The defense was that his failure to return all the income he had received resulted from the mistaken but sincere belief that he…